


Heart and Soul

by GenericUsername01



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Assassin John, M/M, Myth Retelling, Mythology - Freeform, Not nearly as morally dubious as you’d expect, Some Humor, cupid and psyche, john kills bad cabbies and other mean people, there's a little violence but i don't consider it graphic
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-05-01
Updated: 2019-05-02
Packaged: 2020-02-10 10:46:19
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 5,697
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18658870
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/GenericUsername01/pseuds/GenericUsername01
Summary: Modern retelling of the Cupid and Psyche myth with John as Cupid and Sherlock as PsycheJohn's an assassin hired by the jealous Moriarty to take out one Sherlock Holmes. He didn't expect to fall in love with his mark.





	1. A Job

**Author's Note:**

> I realize the irony of casting John Watson as the "god of desire" who likes to shoot people. Please feel free to make as many cheesy jokes about it as you want

Grunewald Manor was set far out in the country. It lay deep in the center of a valley, surrounded by a lush wood. It was almost more palace than manor-- complete with an extravagant fountain in the center courtyard, a drive a half mile long, columns and balconies and towers with spires.

360 degree perimeter surveillance and snipers in the trees. Only one way in or out, a thick stone wall surrounding the entire square mile of land it sat on, and not an inch of it unguarded.

John idled his Jeep about fifteen feet back from the gates. There were four guards currently on duty, all toting semi-automatics, but he had no doubt that was their only weapon. One approached his vehicle, the others hanging back.

"Captain John Watson, here to see the professor," he said. "Butterfly."

The guard nodded, gave the all-clear gesture, and the gates opened before him.

* * *

The professor's study was just about as expected: not his real study. No maps anywhere, no papers on the desk, not even a cup of pens. An obvious false front without even an attempt at fooling anyone.

Didn't particularly matter. John was here for a single-gig job interview; he didn't need to know about all of the professor's ongoing projects.

Moriarty was a small man, average in looks and entirely unassuming. He steepled his fingers together across his desk. John sat back in his chair and waited.

"There is a man," he said. "A Mr. Sherlock Holmes. Calls himself a consulting detective. I want you to kill him."

"Figure?" he asked.

"40,000. Half up front, half when you get it done."

"Any special requests?"

Some clients wanted him to deliver a final, parting message to the deceased. Others wanted some sentimental token given-- a wedding ring, a certain type of flower. From what John had heard, the professor had quite a flair for the dramatic.

"No. He'll understand what's happened."

"Do you have a file on him?"

"No. He lives in London at 221B Baker Street. Some martial arts training, but nothing noteworthy. Our last intel says he owns no weapons. He's a civilian; it should be simple enough. I believe that's all you need to know."

John nodded. Moriarty waved a hand, and the giant pile of muscle in the corner moved forward. He laid a briefcase on the desk, flicking it open to show off the cash.

He gave it a quick examination, determined it to be real and nonsequential, and then he shook the professor's hand.

* * *

He put himself up in a cheap hotel near Baker Street and began his own research. He didn't go into any job blind, much as just about every client would like him to. Except, of course, for the ones who wanted to monologue about whatever great evil the mark had committed that pushed them to seeking out a hitman. And John just had to suffer through those encounters and nod along. Deranged people don't like being reminded that their hitman is not their therapist. It's not dangerous in any way-- John can take care of himself-- but it sure is annoying as fuck, not to mention bad for business.

Sherlock Holmes. Consulting detective, works cases with Scotland Yard occasionally as well as for private clients. Has stumbled onto something of the professor's at least three times that John knows of personally. Younger brother to the ever-formidable Mycroft Holmes. Runs an extremely pretentious website where he lies through his teeth about the extent of his abilities.

Seemingly endless reasons to want him dead.

John doesn't always sympathize with his clients. Hell, sometimes he flat-out disagrees with their motives. But just from what he's read online, this Holmes bloke seems like the most annoying arse to ever have been born. He gets it.

He watches him for about a week to learn his habits and figure out the best way to do this before he makes a move. Sherlock hangs out with a lot of police, unfortunately, and John would really rather not give the elderly landlady a heart attack.

He... also needs to observe him on a case. Professionally. Of course, obviously, John knows he can't possibly live up to the hype. No one could. But he should come up with his own gauge of the man's capabilities. For the hit.

The scene is, interestingly, a hit he made over two weeks ago that the police are just now finding out about. Body found slumped over on the couch in the victim’s own living room.

That’s the thing about holiday hits: no one even looks for you if you time it right. An important businessman can leave his office on December 23, not be heard of for weeks after, and no one’ll suspect a thing until his posh country neighbors report a strange smell.

John arrives at the scene just three minutes after Sherlock. The house itself is taped off, surrounded by murmuring reporters and flashing cameras.

He pickpockets a press badge immediately, clips it onto his shirt pocket where it’ll be clearly visible. The man he took it from had had it on his belt, as did most of the reporters here.

He wanders around, peering obviously, and ducks under the tape just far enough away from most of the crowd. From there, creeping into the house is a simple matter.

A forensic tech with a rat face and a full-body blue suit is on him in less than two minutes.

”You can’t be in here,” he sneered. “Restricted area, official personnel only. Absolutely no—“

Solid hit to the head and jabs to the spine and neck. John lowers him down gently.

He ditches his ridiculous scarf and press badge in a nearby closet and steals the man’s dust suit. His bulking camera bag is emptied out, the steel briefcase luckily fitting right in all on its own.

Not that he was going to shoot Sherlock in a room full of coppers. Or shoot his way out of this. But should the need arise, he had brought his gun that looked the least like a gun and the most like a piece of strange science equipment. No scope, and with the right confidence, he has no doubt that he could fully assemble the thing and fire it before anyone suspects a thing.

Sherlock is in the living room, surrounded by three police officers, one of whom John recognizes as his main contact with the Yard, a Detective Inspector Lestrade.

Sherlock stands up, distancing himself from the body. “Shot through the window, almost certainly long-range. Bullet hit dead center in the back of the head. The shooter was either a highly skilled marksman or used a scope; balance of probability— both. This was a professional hit by a hired gun.”

”What?” one of the other officers squawked. “Are you kidding me? Who the hell takes out a hit on— on some random CEO?”

Sherlock snorted. “The business world is called ‘cut-throat’ for a reason, is it not?”

The other detective folded her arms. “Magnussen didn’t have any board to answer to. He had no successor named, there is no clear candidate to take over his position. He had full ownership of his company. No shareholders. Absolutely no one benefits from his death. Not even rival companies! This doesn’t take down his franchise at all, it just means someone else will head it up. There’s no motive, Holmes. None.”

”Donovan, once again, you are being purposely ignorant purely for the sake of argument. Surely you can’t possibly be this stupid.”

She opened her mouth to snarl something, but Lestrade cut her off. “Sherlock, if you have a theory, then just say it.”

He sniffed. He walked back over to the body and gestured grandly. “This man was a blackmailer,” he said.

John raised an eyebrow. Magnussen’s house had something of an open floor plan, and he went unnoticed in the kitchen, as did the briefcase oh-so-casually by his feet.

It would be all too easy to just snap the pieces of gun together and take the shot. Sherlock drops dead, a bullet through the brain, and John is out the back before anyone recovers enough to even look.

But no.

Sherlock was still talking.

"Magnussen is a bottom feeder and a predator of the lowest sort. I've been dancing around him for a while now, waiting for a good enough reason to take him on. Eight different clients have come to me with claims that Magnussen was blackmailing them. It was always for dreadfully dull reasons that they deserved to be scammed for, though, so I refused all the cases."

 _"What?!"_ Lestrade said. "Sherlock, extortion is a legitimate crime. You should  _tell us_ when you know about crimes being committed. Remember when you first started doing this? And you would just call us on the tip line and give helpful tips? Can you go back to doing that?"

"God, please," Donovan muttered. Sherlock shot her a glare.

"Well fine, if I'm so unwanted, then maybe I'll just leave and take all my helpful tips with me," he said.

"No," Lestrade said. "No, she didn't mean it like that. Right, Donovan?"

She gritted her teeth. "Right, sir."

"Great. So, Sherlock, what else do you have?"

A passing forensic tech eyes John strangely. He hefts his briefcase on to the counter. At least assembling the gun will make him look busy. It'll be in plain view of the detectives, but without the scope, he could easily pass it off as a portable microscope.

"Magnussen had enemies, plenty of them. You're looking for a blackmail victim. Someone was recently threatened and decided to do something about it rather than pay up. Why? An experienced blackmailer like Magnussen never demands more than his victim can give, and he never threatens over a secret they don't care about revealing. No, this was about pride. Pride and paranoid, vindictive rage. Someone had money and a secret and they were determined to keep them both. Magnussen was asking for upwards of 15,000 or 20,000-- any less, and hiring a hitman wouldn't have been worth it, they aren't exactly cheap. The hirer was most likely a woman. When most people want someone murdered, they do it themselves and are caught almost immediately. Women tend to be more hands-off about murder, less personal and more calculating, hence their predominate use of poison. A man is also more likely to feel emasculated by having to hire someone to commit his murders for him."

"That makes no sense," Donovan said.

"Hyper-masculinity often doesn't," he said. "So. You're looking for a woman of great means and great pride, petty, and with a secret."

"That's--" Lestrade said. "Well. That's a start."

John had the gun put together and on its kickstand, which was a flippy, swivel sort of thing. He started messing around with it, squinting at the back end and pretending he was examining something crime-y or whatever. Sherlock's sharp, clear eyes landed on him, and John felt the gaze down to his bones.

The gun had those spinny little adjusters on it-- just like a microscope-- for the scope that was nowhere to be found. John spun those around a bit-- delicately, as if with great concentration.

Sherlock's next deductions came out in a single breath, rapid-fire. "The woman was old money, high society. Overconfident and thought herself invulnerable. She lashed out when that idea was threatened. Someone with a more tenuous hold on that position would have been cowed. She would have used her own money to pay for the hit; she's independently wealthy. Independently wealthy, old money-- either she has quite a hefty trust fund or she's already come into her inheritance. Based on the scale needed for this, I favor the latter. If it is the former, however, then given that most trust funds have such stipulations that one must be over 25, or 30, or married, you can assume that she isn't overly young. The other theory supports this as well-- the older you are, the more likely your parents are dead. And a woman like this doesn't sit on a threat. No, she had her meeting with Magnussen, waited a few days, a week at the most, and then got things in order in a matter of hours. Search Magnussen's appointment book. He had a meeting with someone who fits that profile exactly no less than eight days before he was murdered."

 _Wrong,_ John thought. Wrong, because a hit isn't instant. Because John cases his targets and figures out what he's getting into first. No diving in blindly.

He'd watched Magnussen for four and a half days before he pulled the trigger.

But Sherlock had described Lady Smallwood exactly.

_Brilliant._

And just then that genius man locked eyes with him and John's heart sped up. He fumbled blindly with the gun, and--

It wasn't quite a bang, with their silencer on, and it certainly wasn't recognizable as a gunshot.

John sucked in a breath and bit down on his lip, hard. The entire room was staring at him. "Sorry," he said, Northern accent. "Sorry, I, uh, dropped something. Spare equipment back out in the truck; I'll just pop on out and get it."

He disassembled the gun rapidly, fingers thankfully not shaking, and booked it out of there, ever mindful of the angles.

The route he took back to his Jeep just to avoid being seen by the crowds took thirty extra minutes, and it was hell with the bleeding leg.


	2. Doesn't Add Up

Okay.

Shooting yourself in the foot sucked.

Shooting yourself in the foot and having to patch it up yourself in a third-rate bedsit because hospitals are required to report all gunshot wounds to the police sucked even more.

Now technically, mind you, John had not actually shot himself in the foot. He had shot himself in the lower leg, just above the ankle. His shin, really. He shot himself in the shin.

The bullet was still lodged in there and John was pretty sure he could feel it scraping along his tibia when he moved, if it was even possible to feel such a thing. And this was a good thing, really, because the bullet being in his leg meant it was not at the crime scene. Plus, exit wounds did a whole lot of extra damage. The last time John had been shot, it had been a through-and-through, and he'd almost bled out on the sand and got a near-fatal infection.

Admittedly, that had been in a much more key area, and the bullet had shattered his scapula and grazed the subclavian artery. This bullet, on the other hand, had gone through a bit of skin and muscle and been almost immediately stopped by one of the strongest bones in the human body. It wasn't a threat so much as it was a nuisance.

He shot himself in the foot while on a hit. God. How's he going to look himself in the mirror after this? A pretty boy looked at him and he got distracted and fucking shot himself in the fucking foot. Fuck.

He gets out the first aid kit he keeps in the bathroom for instances that are usually much cooler and more badass than this is, and he thoroughly cleans and bandages the wound. Contrary to what TV dramas have popularized for scare factor, bullets do not actually need to be dug out of bodies unless they are actively causing further damage. If you have a bullet that's just sitting, perfect pleasant, lodged in muscle tissue, then unnecessary traumatic surgery to rip it out is guaranteed to a lot of harm and absolutely no good.

It's going to act up when it rains and give him a limp and generally be a bloody nuisance, but that's pretty much fair penance for being so stupid as to shoot yourself in the foot, god damn.

* * *

Sherlock had been watching the forensic tech.

He'd seen him fiddle with his equipment. Heard a loud bang, not like a gunshot, quieter, but not like something fell either.

The forensic tech's eyes had widened, his entire body rose up a bit, and he'd bitten his lip, hard, drawing in a silent breath that surely only Sherlock noticed. He smoothed his face back into placidity a second later, but the understated tension had never left his frame.

He'd made some pitiful excuse and scurried out. The others seemed to buy it. Or at least, they didn't think it was  _maliciously_ suspicious.

Sherlock had been watching the man before, during, and after the incident. His equipment remained unmoved and his hands visible above the counter. He certainly hadn't dropped anything.

And even well before, when he had first caught sight of the man, Sherlock had known he wasn't a tech. He knows a microscope when he sees one, and that was not a bloody microscope.

Also, who would bring a microscope directly to a crime scene? Does the man not know anything about the forensic process? Sherlock had fully intended to confront him about it and set him to rights after he'd dealt with the case, but the man had left before he'd gotten the chance. Damned rude.

And furthermore, he'd gotten out and assembled a miniature sniper rifle under the watchful eye of Scotland Yard's finest, in the boldest, cockiest, most  _brilliant_ move Sherlock had ever seen. And then he'd shot himself with it, like a common buffoon, and proceeded to grit his teeth and calmly walk out as if he hadn't just been  _fucking shot._

Absurd. Brilliant.

And they say Sherlock is mad.

The other officers on the scene had essentially shrugged and moved on. Anderson came stumbling out of a side hallway not ten minutes later, holding his head and claiming assault.

"Can you describe the man who did it?" Lestrade asked, emanating concern.

"Yeah, it was some bloody crazy reporter. Uh, Caucasian male, early thirties. Had sort of spiky brown hair and a beard."

"The forensic tech." Donovan looked to Lestrade sharply.

"Yeah, he stole my dust suit!"

Sherlock wants to shake his hand.

"Can you give us anything more specific?" Lestrade pressed.

"Yeah, uh. He had brown eyes. No, blue, definitely blue. Um, he was a sort of hipster type, wore this big thick scarf and a plaid shirt. A reporter, you know reporters," Anderson said. "Some freak who'd break into a crime scene just to get the latest story."

 _Brown eyes,_ Sherlock mentally corrected. Not that he'd dare help them catch this man. Not that it would matter how accurately he was described at all. If he was as good as Sherlock suspected he was, then a disguise could be as easily shed or donned as a set of clothes.

"Yeah," Lestrade said. "Yeah, that's probably it."

* * *

John washes the product and dye out of his hair. Removes his colored contacts, his favorite pair-- brown is so generic. Shaves off the week's worth of growth on his face, immaculately groomed and darkened with brown mascara. He owns a surprising amount of makeup products, actually, and he gets weird looks when he goes shopping for them, but the fuck does he care about it?

And then he goes to the park to go sit on a bench and think about killing Sherlock Holmes. He has a plan now, has from the very beginning, really. This is actually an incredibly simple hit and shouldn't be taking so long. John needs to get off his ass and just fucking finish it already.

Tonight, he decides. He'll kill him tonight.

And that, of course, is when Mike Bloody Stamford appears.

John, unfortunately, has a traceable past with hundreds of people who knew him casually and aren't currently dead. Mike Stamford is one of them. He could always move to another country and start fresh, but-- as Mike so succinctly put it-- he can't bear to be away from London.

"Couldn't Harry help?"

"Yeah, like that's gonna happen."

John tried to keep a good 25 miles at least between him and his sister, nowadays. No one touched her. Even if someone did find out John's identity, they likely still wouldn't target her. After all, everyone knew that they were estranged.

For the best, really.

"I don't know, get a flatshare or something?"

He snorted. "Come on. Who'd want me for a flatmate?"

"...You're the second person who's said that to me today."

"Who was the first?"

Mike brightened. "Oh, he's the perfect bloke for you Johnny. Sherlock Holmes. Do you want me to introduce you? He's probably still at Bart's."

John's heart jumped immediately into his throat, because  _what the fuck._ These two parts of his life were definitely not supposed to mix. Old friends from uni should not be introducing him to the man he was going to kill later that evening. Absolutely not.

"Uh, thanks mate, but I think I'll pass on that one. I'm fine where I'm at. Didn't mean to make it seem all that bad, it's-- it's good. Really."

"Ah," Mike said, not understanding at all. "Right. Well, if you change your mind."

John nodded. "If I change my mind."

* * *

Instead of his usual moping about the flat like the antisocial recluse he was, Sherlock was, strangely, called to his second crime scene in a single day. Apparently another murder, but John hadn't committed that one, and as tempting as it was to sneak onto the scene again and see if Sherlock could be dazzling, it simply wasn't worth the risk.

So it was a damn good thing he had planted a listening device on Lestrade's jacket earlier.

And he had thought Sherlock was amazing  _before._ Before he'd seen the man tell a woman's hometown by the turn of her coat. Her profession by her sense of style. Her romantic history for the past ten years inclusive just by her  _jewelry._

The man was a menace. He was an out-and-out genius, and John felt a pang of regret at the idea of being the one to rid the world of his beautiful mind. Seemed a shame. A waste, really.

Sherlock dashed out of the crime scene and ran around in dimly lit back alleys for an hour. He may as well have held up a flashing neon sign that said 'KILL ME,' but John was classier than that, so he refrained.

Sherlock's body was not going to be found gunned down in an alley as if some common criminal had mugged him. No. He would be found laying in bed with a bullet in the brain, clearly assassinated as part of a much larger ploy. He deserved for his work and intellect to be acknowledged in his death. He deserved a good death.

Sherlock went into a restaurant, shook hands with the owner, sat at the table by the window and refused a menu. John decided to conveniently fail at hailing cabs across the street, and get distracted by his phone whenever one came too close.

Then Sherlock ran out into the street, nearly got hit by a car, and sprinted over to a cab across the way. Then proceeded to _bloody chase it through London._

John swore and followed.

He ducked into an alleyway just in time to see the madman accost the vehicle and start screaming at its passenger. John's blood was positively thrumming through his veins, fuck. This was  _better_ than most of his hits.

Sherlock went home and John camped out in the flat across the street from him. He was only ever there for watching-Sherlock purposes, but fuck, he could afford it.

Said mad detective eventually got into a cab and John decided to follow, on a lark.

He arrived at the college, saw a light on in a window, and went into the building opposite for the perfect viewpoint to watch from.

Damn good thing he did, because he saw Sherlock holding up one of those suicide pills to the light, and no. Surely no. He was a genius. He was not this fundamentally stupid.

He brought the pill to his lips and John fired without thinking.


	3. The Hit

John leaves the scene of the crime as fast as possible and immediately heads back to his dreary old bedsit.

That was most certainly  _not_ the plan. He was supposed to be  _killing_ Sherlock, not saving him.

Maybe he could persuade the professor to--

No. If he tried to back out, Moriarty would have him killed. If he tried to give back the money, Moriarty would have him killed. If he simply failed to complete the job and moved on to other projects, Moriarty would have him killed. There is no scenario in which John Watson walks out of this alive. Not without killing Sherlock.

It's his life or his own. And Sherlock may be a beautiful, endlessly fascinating bloke, but John simply isn't willing to make that trade.

Tonight. He said he'd kill him tonight, and he's damn well going to follow through.

When he gets to his bedsit, however, there is a cheap, old-style flip phone sitting innocuously on the table.

John rolls his eyes and settles in to ignore it.

* * *

The phone rings 97 minutes later exactly. John picks it up without hesitation.

"Hello?"

"Hello, Mr. Watson," an unfamiliar voice purrs.

"It's Doctor, actually."

The voice chuckles. "Right, of course," it said. "An operative was killed tonight at Roland Kerr College. I don't suppose you know anything about that?"

"No, of course not. Why do you ask?"

"Well, I understand you've been trailing Holmes for the past eight days. He was involved. It stands to reason you might have seen something."

"Nope," he said. "No, sorry, didn't see a thing."

"Right," the voice said, darker now. "It seems like you might've misunderstand your orders. Now personally, I thought they were pretty clear, but maybe you need another meeting with the professor to sort things out?"

"Not necessary," he said. "I've got it well handled. The job'll be finished tonight, barring any unforseen circumstances. Like giant meatheads jumping in headfirst, guns blazing. That'd muck things right up."

"Why is Holmes still alive?"

"Because it's my privilege to kill him and I'm damn well gonna do it," he said. "You don't hire a man to do a job and then let someone wheedle in and steal it. It's just not on. Tell your boss to get control of his bloody network. Holmes is mine, and he's officially off-limits."

He snaps the phone shut decisively.

* * *

He heads out three hours later with just a small handgun tucked into his waistband, his jacket covering it neatly. He takes a nondescript cab to Baker Street and makes quick work of breaking in.

Up the stairs, skip the fourth and seventh steps (they creak), and into Sherlock's unlocked flat. 

It's  messy as hell, of course. It's perfect, it's what John imagines it to be like inside Sherlock's head, now that he's thought about it. Chaotic, vaguely morbid, but he knows it’s organized in a way he just can’t see.

He draws his weapon and creeps into Sherlock’s bedroom. The man is sleeping, buried under a rumpled comforter, the softest moonlight falling across the bed through the curtains, just enough to illuminate a gorgeous silhouette. His features seemed even more delicate in sleep; softer, as if John was seeing him relaxed in a way he never was while awake.

He approached the side of the bed slowly, silently. Lifted the gun and brought it to position just a centimeter from Sherlock’s forehead.

He paused, taking just a moment to—

The world tilted and he found himself on his back, wrists pinned to the bed, his gun clattering somewhere in the distance.

Sherlock breathed harshly on top of him, every muscle rigid. John’s blood was a rush of pure adrenaline in his veins.

”Hello,” John breathed. “I got the wrong flat?”

"You've been following me," Sherlock said. "Probably for a while now, but I just noticed today. You showed up at Magnussen's house, pretending to be a reporter pretending to be a forensic tech. You assembled a miniature sniper rifle in a room packed with cops and then shot yourself in the leg with it. You think I don't recognize a gun when I see one?"

"Thought I could pass it off as a microscope, to be honest."

"I know microscopes too," Sherlock said, leaning in further. "I wasn't sure who you were after at first-- Lestrade is chief of homicide, I'm not that well known, and I couldn't entirely rule out the possibility of you being a terrorist who just wanted to take out as many cops as possible. But no. You did so much better than that. You kept following me on my next case, all the way to the college. I think I heard you on the rooftops during the chase, but I never saw. And then you shot the cabbie for me. Why?"

"What makes you think I did that?" he asked. "Maybe the cabbie had a lot of enemies. He did kill people, you know."

Sherlock groaned in frustration, and John was tempted to break the hold right then, to pull the other man down and snog him senseless. But no.

He held still. He let Sherlock talk.

"Of course it was you, it had to be you. Seeing as you left Magnussen's house without blowing it to pieces, that means you're an assassin, not a terrorist. A stranger with a gun just happens to show up at two of my crime scenes in one day? It's connected. It's you. I got the profile a bit wrong when I gave it to Lestrade though. I said the shooter had a strong moral compass, seeing as you waited until the last second to fire. That wasn't it at all though, was it? Extremely moral people do not become assassins. Your hesitation to fire had nothing to do with a reluctance to take a life. No. You were waiting to see if I'd actually do it, and you didn't want to kill the cabbie unless you absolutely had to. Why? There has to be a... Oh."

"What?" John asked. "Come on. Tell me."

"You know who he was working for," he said. "And you're afraid of his boss. Workplace rivalry, is it?"

"No, not at all." John grinned. "Completely wrong, actually. I had no bloody clue who that cabbie was. I just don't go around killing people unless I have a reason to."

"Then why the hell are you an assassin?"

He shrugged, as much as he was able to. "Because it's fun."

Sherlock lifted up slightly, as if to study him, though John knew for a fact that he couldn't be more than a vague shape in the dark, his face completely obscured. "You are possibly the most interesting person I've ever met. And I knew a woman in the Canadian maritimes who would garrote people and then tan their skin into leather and sell it in a street market."

"Really? How come I've never heard of that case? Seems like the sort of thing that would have been big news."

"Oh, I confronted her and she ended up shooting herself. Then I fled Canada and didn't breathe a word of it to the police," he said. "I have my own notes on the case, of course. Quite interesting."

"Oh, you'll have to show me sometime," John said, smiling.

"You'll have to answer some questions first. Who are you and why are you here? Do you work for my brother?"

"Does this seem like the sort of thing your brother would do? Send an assassin to trail you?"

"Oh, this seems exactly like the sort of thing he'd do. It's got his fingerprints all over it," he said. "But judging by your response, I guess not. So what the hell are you doing here? You've been sending quite a few mixed messages. Are you protecting me or hunting me?"

 _There,_ John lurched and flipped them both over so that Sherlock was pinned quite securely underneath him, nothing at all like that flimsy 'hold' he'd had John in earlier. He leaned down, his lips almost brushing the detective's ear. "Can't I do both?"

Sherlock thrashed in his grip, wriggling futilely. "Fuck."

"No, actually. Here to kill you. Sort of the opposite of that."

"What, are you saying your cock has magic life-sustaining abilities?"

"Oh, yeah, definitely," he said easily. "Hey, stay put on the bed, alright? I just need to go get my gun."

"What? No!"

John ignored that and crawled off of him, searching around the right side of the room blindly for wherever his gun had been thrown. Sherlock actually did stay in one place for a moment, then he snapped himself out of it and sprang into action. He scrambled out of the bed, ended up tripping and falling to his knees on the floor, but he was back up in an instant, making a mad dash for the door--

John caught him by the arm and pulled him backwards, spinning him around to give himself a tight grip on his waist. He marched Sherlock back to the bed and threw him down on it, cocked his gun and aimed.

Sherlock froze.

The moment hung between them, crystalline, thick with tension.

”I don’t usually do this, with my victims,” John explained. “But you seem special. So. Any last words? Final requests?”

”Yeah, don’t kill me,” he said dryly.

”Except that one.”

”I can make you a deal.”

”You really can’t.”

”I can make _Moriarty_ a deal.”

John stiffened. “Where did you learn that name?”

”Oh, a little old cabbie told me. Maybe you know him? Murderous, poor sense of direction, you shot him about five hours ago.”

”What could you _possibly_ have to offer the professor?”

”So he is the one who sent you. Pity. And here I’d hoped you’d been stalking me properly.”

”Oh, I’d be so much less interesting if I was just some deranged civilian from the internet, Sherlock, you know that,” he said. “Now say something worthwhile or I'll just blow your head off.”

”I can offer him my brother.”


End file.
